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Recommended packages after a RHEL 6.1 installation

By: Bill Buros. I thought this would be a relatively trivial exercise, but as with any good technology answer, it depends. It depends on your server, how it's controlled, and the distro releases you have. In this case, I have a Power7 server connected to an HMC with RHEL 6.1 installed on the server which is connected to a previously enabled RHEL 6.1 yum repo.

NOTE: That "enabled RHEL 6 yum repo" is an important assumption. You can check that you have that enabled with the command

The second note is these instructions assume you can get through company firewall's to get to outside repositories. You will require firewall access to public.dhe.ibm.com (9.17.248.112) and linuxpatch.ncsa.uiuc.edu (141.142.192.67)

Here we provide the short-cut links and steps for this process. Read the instructions if you have a different setup.

First, we highly recommend the new yum repo process. So to start, go to

and under the Yum repository section at the top of the page, click on theLearn more and download tools. Course, you could skip a step and just click on that "learn more" link here.

From the yum page, there a Configuration RPM file that you need to download and install on your system. In my case and at this time, the file I downloaded was named ibm-power-repo-1.1.6-5.ppc.rpm. I believe that this file works across RHEL 5, RHEL 6, SLES 10, and SLES 11, but here I'm just playing around with RHEL 6.1 so that's all I tested.

Step 1: rpm -i ibm-power-1.1.6-5.ppc.rpm

Once that's installed, you should install the recommended packages

Step 2: yum install ibm-power-managed-rhel6

In my case, the results of this command were:

Installed: ibm-power-managed-rhel6.ppc64 0:1.0.1-4

Dependency Installed:

DynamicRM.ppc64 0:1.3.9-7

IBMinvscout.ppc64 0:2.3.2-2

devices.chrp.base.ServiceRM.ppc 0:2.3.0.0-11231

ksh.ppc64 0:20100621-6.el6

librtas.ppc 0:1.3.6-3

libservicelog.ppc 0:1.1.11-7.el6

libvpd.ppc 0:2.1.3-2.el6

ncurses-libs.ppc 0:5.7-3.20090208.el6

powerpc-utils-python.ppc64 0:1.2.1-5

ppc64-diag.ppc64 0:2.4.2-1.el6

readline.ppc 0:6.0-3.el6

rsct.core.ppc 0:3.1.0.7-11277

rsct.core.utils.ppc 0:3.1.0.7-11277

servicelog.ppc64 0:1.1.9-7

sqlite.ppc 0:3.6.20-1.el6 src.ppc 0:1.3.1.1-11277

Dependency Updated:

librtas.ppc64 0:1.3.6-3

libservicelog.ppc64 0:1.1.11-7.el6

libvpd.ppc64 0:2.1.3-2.el6

lsvpd.ppc64 0:1.6.11-4.el6

Complete!

Finally, we very often take advantage of the latest Advance Toolchain compilers and optimized system libraries, so the last step for now is to install the latest Advance Toolchain 5.0 packages.

Step 3: yum install advance-toolchain-at5*

Which nicely downloads and installs the -devel, -perf, and -runtime rpms on the server. The Advance Toolchain packages are about 650MB in total, so that's something I usually start and return to later.

There are of course more packages, more recommendations, more tools. But this should get you started. You might consider the IBM SDK. We always recommend oprofile on your system.